Trump promised to kill offshore wind by executive order on day one. Federal judges blocked him.

So he switched to a method the courts can't stop: writing checks.

Last week his administration agreed to pay German energy company RWE more than $1.2 billion to walk away from its U.S. offshore wind projects — including the only one planned in the Gulf of Mexico's federal waters, a 2,000-megawatt wind farm south of Louisiana that could have powered more than 350,000 homes.

That's your money. Paid to a foreign company. So that it doesn't build something.

The scale of it

The RWE deal is the biggest so far, but it isn't the first. The administration has now bought out about a dozen offshore wind leases, paying developers nearly $4 billion.

RWE isn't a marginal player. It's the world's second-largest offshore wind developer, running 19 wind farms across five countries. In late 2023 it paid $5.6 million for the right to develop in the Gulf's first-ever offshore wind lease auction — 102,000 acres about 40 miles south of Lake Charles.

RWE's own explanation of why it quit:

"After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the U.S. for the foreseeable future."

Not "the economics changed." Not "the wind is bad." There is no path forward to permit these projects.

The part that should make you sit up

The settlements don't just pay companies to stop building wind. Many of them require the company to spend its money on fossil fuels instead.

Under this agreement, RWE will invest:

• $900 million to acquire a stake in Louisiana LNG, a planned liquefied natural gas export terminal near Lake Charles — one of the largest in the country, and set to be one of the state's largest sources of climate-warming pollution.
• $300 million to reserve natural gas turbines for new gas-fired power plants.

Read that structure again. The federal government pays a company $1.2 billion to cancel a project, and as a condition, the company redirects $1.2 billion of its own money into the industries the administration prefers.

That is not deregulation. It is the government using public money to pick which private company invests in what — the exact thing Republicans spend every energy debate saying they oppose.

More than 50 environmental groups had urged RWE not to give in to the administration's "fossil fuel whims" before the deal closed.

What Louisiana specifically lost

Louisiana wasn't a reluctant host. RWE said it chose the state precisely because of Louisiana's political support for offshore wind and its large offshore energy workforce — the people who have spent careers building and servicing oil and gas platforms in the Gulf.

Those are the same workers. The same skills. The same shipyards.

Louisiana companies with offshore oil and gas ties helped build America's first offshore wind farm off Rhode Island, and had picked up engineering and construction contracts on East Coast projects. RWE planned to tap that workforce. It had already signed an agreement with Entergy to sell the power to customers in Louisiana and Texas.

A 2020 National Renewable Energy Laboratory study of a smaller hypothetical wind farm near Lake Charles estimated nearly 4,500 construction jobs and $445 million in goods and services — then 150 permanent jobs and about $14 million a year into the region once running.

Louisiana had set a goal of 5,000 megawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2035, proposed in 2021. Under Gov. Jeff Landry, who took office in 2024, that goal appears to have been abandoned.

Katharine Kollins, president of the Southeastern Wind Coalition, on what the deal does:

"This decision walks back years of development and stymies economic opportunity for the state."

She added that the administration should be supporting options for domestic energy production, "not removing them."

Where the policy actually comes from

It is worth being honest about the origin of this. Trump's hostility to wind turbines is not an energy analysis. It dates to at least 2006, when he began a decade-long fight with the Scottish government over an offshore wind farm he said would spoil the views from a golf course he was developing. He lost, and was ordered to pay Scotland nearly $300,000 in legal fees.

Since then he has claimed wind turbines drive up food prices, interrupt television reception, cause cancer, and drive people insane.

Four billion dollars of public money is now moving on the strength of that.

The pattern

When the courts said no, the administration didn't change course — it found a way around. That's becoming the house style. When a federal judge ruled the EPA's climate grant cancellations illegal, the agency decided the ruling meant it had to do nothing. When the Endangered Species Act got in the way, the administration simply rewrote the rule defining what counts as harming a species.

Meanwhile in Congress, Republicans have been running the same play through legislation — writing bills to make burning gas legally "clean" and to gut clean-air protections on behalf of Big Oil.

Still a chance, eventually

Madelyn Smith of the Southeastern Wind Coalition points out that a project on RWE's scale could be revived fairly quickly — much of the siting and feasibility work is already done, and another federal lease sale could be organized without much trouble.

The obstacle isn't engineering, or economics, or Louisiana. As she put it, for now the main obstacle is Trump.

"There's still hope under a different administration."

Source

Tristan Baurick, "Trump's offshore wind crackdown reaches the Gulf of Mexico," Verite News / Louisiana Illuminator, Aug. 15, 2026. Photo courtesy of RWE.